Infinite City

A San Francisco Atlas

We know the map like the back of our hand. There's the thumb-like peninsula of San Francisco, with Marin County reaching down as if to make contact. The delta is there, as are the bay and the pale blue Pacific beyond.

But what are all these names? Alaguali, Bahnomtara, Julpun, Urebure, Volvon, Yatchikumne ... On and on they go, dozens of them, dotting the map, their collective impact disturbing our sense of the familiar.

The map - of indigenous people who lived in the Bay Area in 1769 - is just one of the many powerful and thought-provoking creations that grace "Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas," the latest book by cultural historian Rebecca Solnit.

Introducing readers to her project - 22 beautiful maps and the essays that accompany them - Solnit writes, "A city is many worlds in the same place. Or many maps of the same place."

With her usual eloquence, she writes, "San Francisco has eight hundred thousand inhabitants, more or less, and each of them possesses his or her own map of the place, a world of amities, amours, transit routes, resources, and perils, radiating out from home."

Solnit drew the title of her book from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" - "Venice, like San Francisco, is small; they are vast not in territory but in imaginative possibility" - and her atlas, she writes, is "a small, modest, and deeply arbitrary rendering of one citizen's sense of her place in conversation and collaboration with others."

But what a wonderful arbitrary rendering it is.

One map, titled "Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area Since World War II," shows us how the migration of African Americans from the South fueled a vibrant music and political scene. The map highlights Black Panther activities and features, among many artists, Sly Stone, Tupac Shakur and Too $hort.

One of the more inspired maps (art by Mona Caron) is "Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces." Aaron Shurin, in his accompanying essay, writes with infectious enthusiasm: "This is a map of tribes, of flitting things and their gathering spots, of wings and of wingspread, of extravagant names and impossible migrations, of will-o'-the-wisps and force of will, a map of fritillaries and fairies."

On an even more whimsical note (which is welcome, as Solnit's tone often tends toward lefty earnestness), one map juxtaposes neighborhood cafes with water treatment plants and their often-overlooked but very essential corollary: sewer lines. Solnit is fond of such pairings in her maps, she writes, "because this city is, as all good cities are, a compilation of coexisting differences, of the Baptist church next to the dim sum dispensary, the homeless outside the Opera House."

Other maps are more straightforward but no less valuable. "Green Women: Open Spaces and Their Champions" honors the many activists who have not been given their proper due. "The Mission," a map of every hipster's favorite place to slum, leaves out (thankfully) "the gentrified Mission of restaurants and boutiques." "The Lost World" pays tribute to the people forced to leave their homes when the South of Market neighborhood was redeveloped. "It's a lost world," Solnit writes in this especially poignant entry, "not only because these diners and hat blockers and watch repair shops were scraped off the earth long ago but also because something of the dignity of these old laborers in their hats and suspenders, their modest pleasures and fierce commitments, will never exist in the same form again."

As handsome as the maps are - they're a pleasing mix of muted tones and clear graphics and are free of any slick veneer - one wishes that there had been more artful images, where boundaries were more fluidly drawn, where text was used more creatively, where the distinct shape of the city was put to use. As an example, Frank Jacobs' blog Strange Maps (links.sfgate.com/ZKPQ) compiles amazing images from around the world: One is a map of Manhattan made up entirely of country maps; another (sadly apt) is of California as a stubbed-out cigarette.

One of the most delightful maps in Solnit's book (which grew out of a project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) is Paz de la Calzada's "Phrenological San Francisco," inspired, as she writes, by "the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of phrenology, which argued that one's character and talents could be read from bumps on the skull." Thus we see San Francisco as a man's profile, with Noe Valley drawn as "Love of Family," the Sunset as "Inhabitiveness," the Financial District as "Acquisitiveness."

Solnit writes, humbly, that her book is meant to be just a beginning. She hopes readers will "map their own lives and imagine other ways of mapping, to bring some of the density of mapping we've suggested to this place and to other places."

It is indeed a tribute to Solnit's book that one comes away dreaming up all the San Francisco maps one could create (if one had any artistic talent): a vertical map of the city pairing the heights of buildings and redwoods; a map joining San Francisco and Reykjavik, which share the same tectonic plate; a Muni map whose station names have been replaced with the names of the 2010 San Francisco Giants roster; a map depicting Manifest Destiny in miniature, with the bay side as the settled Atlantic Coast, and the Richmond and Sunset drawn as the terra incognita of the Wild West.